Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A solid-state drive (SSD) can generally be described as a data storage device using integrated circuit assemblies. Although early SSDs used volatile memories such as dynamic random-access memories (DRAMs), modern SSDs are increasingly using non-volatile NAND flash due to the lower cost compared with DRAMs.
A multi-level cell (MLC) can generally be described as a memory element capable of storing more than a single bit of information. An example MLC NAND flash has multiple voltage levels/states per cell to allow multiple bits to be stored using the same number of transistors as in a single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash. For example, in an MLC NAND flash capable of storing two bits of information per cell, four voltage levels/states (e.g., V0 for “00”, V1 for “01”, V2 for “11” and V3 for “10”) are used to store desired data.